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To uphold Islamic beliefs, people are
limited to what they are exposed to so that they cannot think of
anything in contrary with Islam. To reach this goal, censorship is
used to prevent people from understanding, acting and even thinking
of facts that Islam rejects. There are many different ways of
censoring in Islam to keep people in the Muslim scholars’ ideal
condition of ignorance. One of the most ridiculous methods that truly
bothers me is censorship in books, especially in educational books
just like my book.

To improve my English, I have taken a
Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) course. Learners of English
around the world who are taking the CAE course may not have any idea
about books published for the same course in Iran. The versions here
are not the original. Actually some changes are made before
publishing. However, original ones can be found rarely. One of my
classmates owns one.

Comparing the original version with the
Islamic one, censorship can be easily seen in different parts of the
books. Here are just a couple of examples:

In Unit 2, page 20 of the original,
there is a passage that reads: “and the first toy doll in the USA
with breasts went into production.” Breasts! Reading such a
word is never accepted. In the Islamic version of the book breasts
is omitted and replaced with no other word.

In Unit 2, page 23: “Lots of people
said they thought the dancing was good.” As dancing is not an
appropriate action in Islamic belief, the word performance is
used instead.

Also, in one of the listening scripts
of the second unit I found another change. In the original it reads:
“It’s a secret I would hate my boyfriend to find out.” As being
in an unmarried relationship with the opposite gender is not accepted
here, I assume the people who were trying to censor this sentence
came to conclusion that they had to make the relationship of the
speaker legal! So the sentence in the Islamic version has been
altered to: “It’s a secret I would hate my fiancé to find out.”

Censorship cannot only be seen in the
text – there have been changes to the images and pictures in the
books too. As women are obligated to cover their bodies from men
according to Islamic rules, highlighting, removing, adding and total
editing with the help of some photo editing software has been done to
censor all images of females’ bodies. There is a photo on page 96
showing women in a pool wearing swimsuits. The women have converted
to Islam and wear shirts if you look at the same photo in the Islamic
version of the book. The arms of little girls have even been edited
so that they appear as they should in Islam.

Islamic rules censor many different
things in order to prevent people from gaining facts and
understanding what is actually going on outside the world of this
religion. But there are ways – such as communicating with free
thinkers and referring to different sources – to avoid being
dictated to by orders from gods or prophets of centuries ago.